Safer (6 page)

“Still, you must have been terrified,” she said. “What went through your mind when you returned home from a short trip to the nearest grocery store to find your wife, Sara, struggling with this man?”

I’d been suckered so easily it was embarrassing. Maya Lamb actually winked.
Your move.
Behind her, the camera guy fine-tuned his lens with one hand and waited to see what I’d do.

Looking back, I suppose I could have raised hell, or shut the door on them, or done any number of things. On the other hand, any self- respecting third grader could have seen that trick coming. I had my pride to consider.

The truth was, squinting against the light from the rolling camera now shining in my eyes, I couldn’t find the energy to be angry. It had been a long, not- so- great day, and something about getting outfoxed by a twenty- something local television reporter seemed to give me all the permission I needed to lighten up. I had to hand it to her.

“It all happened so fast,” I said. “One minute you’re minding your own business, the next you’ve been ambushed in your own home.”

“I can only imagine,” Maya Lamb said.

Our story led the local segment on
News Five Clark Falls.
Sara and I watched the broadcast sitting up in bed. At the sight of me in my television debut—a one- eyed raccoon caught in the headlights of an oncoming car—she laughed a little, patted my leg through the covers, and said, “Sorry. I was still pissed at you.”

“It did occur to me that I should have gone to the meeting.”

“Then you wouldn’t have gotten to be on TV.”

We weren’t fighting anymore. By that point we’d learned
what made a home invasion in Roger Mallory’s neighborhood a great angle.

As it turned out, Roger Mallory wasn’t just the president of the Ponca Heights Neighborhood Association. He was also the head of the Safer Places Organization, a citywide coalition of citizen patrols he’d founded himself half a decade ago.

In her report, Maya Lamb provided the broad strokes. Sara had come home from the meeting with more specific details, most of them supplied by Melody Seward and Trish Firth, whose husbands we’d met the night before, in their neighborhood patrol vests.

Ten years ago—while Sara and I were still getting to know each other in Boston—Roger Mallory had lived right here in Sycamore Court. He’d had a wife named Clair, a son named Brandon, and the rank of sergeant with the Clark Falls Police Department. One crisp autumn afternoon, a Wednesday in the middle of November, twelve- year- old Brandon Mallory stepped off the school bus at the corner of Belmont, a six- minute walk from home. He never got there.

When Brandon hadn’t arrived in time for supper, Clair Mallory began making phone calls. By 10 p.m. the following evening, the local authorities—all of them Roger’s colleagues from the police force, many of them close personal friends— had canvassed the area. They’d spoken to Brandon’s friends and their parents. They’d spoken to his teachers at school. They’d spoken with every kid who had ridden Brandon’s bus that day, along with every available resident of the burgeoning Ponca Heights subdivision.

Within the week, Brandon Mallory’s broad- daylight disappearance had become a statewide news story. Search parties had moved by land and air into the surrounding woods—nearly two thousand acres of state preservation land that, then as now, begins at the backyards of the homes in Sycamore Court and spreads west to the river, north into the bluffs.

On the first day of the organized search, party members
had found Brandon’s backpack at the base of a towering old pin oak just inside the refuge.

The backpack, and that was all. Nobody had seen anything. Nobody could help. It was as if Roger and Clair Mallory’s only son had climbed the tree and vanished into the sky.

The first blizzard of that long cold winter had rolled in on Thanksgiving Day, covering Clark Falls in a foot of snow, effectively shutting down the search effort once and for all.

Five months later, after the spring thaw, hikers discovered a shallow grave deep in the preserve—the same woods Sara’s attacker had likely used to make his escape from our bedroom just twenty- four hours earlier. The grave had been uncovered by animals and had contained the decomposed remains of a young human male.

On the day the Clark Falls Police Department released its official findings to the media, Clair Mallory had run a warm bath, climbed in, swallowed several weeks’ worth of prescription antidepressants, and opened her wrists with a kitchen knife. By the time Roger had gone up to check on her, the water in the tub had already cooled.

“The whole time they’re telling me this,” Sara said, “I just kept thinking,
My God, that’s horrible.
And then it just kept getting worse.”

I didn’t say anything.
Horrible
seemed to cover it.

“Poor Roger. I can’t imagine how I could keep living in the same house all alone. Can you?”

“Not really.” A brief image flashed in my mind, and I wished I could unthink it. “No.”

“Melody Seward told me that when the weather is nice, Roger takes a walk back in those woods nearly every day.”

I thought of our conversation last night.
I guess anything can happen anywhere,
I’d said. I thought of the way Roger had agreed.

“Wow,” I said.

“I just don’t know how you could bear it.”

I didn’t know either, but thinking about the tiny bunch of tissue growing in Sara’s belly, I couldn’t imagine a whole world of things.

I couldn’t imagine what it was going to feel like, the day this little surprise life joined ours. At thirty- seven years of age, I’d only just begun to imagine myself as a father; in no way could I claim to imagine what it would feel like to stand over the grave of my murdered child.

As the sports segment cut to commercials, something made me look at the television. The moment I did, I recognized what it was that had drawn my attention: our new neighbor’s voice.

Before you and your family leave to enjoy your summer vacation this season,
Roger Mallory said,
remember to ask a neighbor to pick up your mail.

Roger stood on the front steps of a cozy brick house between a flower box and a mail slot overflowing with circulars and bills. He looked good on camera: comfortable, casual, authoritative.

Or, arrange for your post office to stop delivery while you’re away. A growing pile of mail can send a message to criminals looking for an easy target.
He pointed to the camera.
For more summertime security tips, log on to
www.saferplace.org
.

The screen cut to a variation on the neighborhood watch logo most everyone knows, the familiar “ not- allowed” symbol over a prowler’s silhouette. An announcer’s voice said,
This neighborhood safety message is brought to you by the Safer Places Organization.

Sara sighed and closed her eyes. She looked like I felt: exhausted, overwhelmed. I sensed a slight change in her posture, a new tension. When I squeezed her hand, she said, “I’m okay.”

“Can I do anything?”

She shook her head, but not in answer to my question. It was the same reflexive gesture I’d performed myself a moment ago, thinking of Clair Mallory, at my own mental picture of finding Sara lolling in a tub of bloody water.

“I swear,” she said, scooting closer, “every time I stop moving for five minutes, I remember what that guy’s breath smelled like.”

Besides being near just then, she’d wanted only one thing from me that day. It really hadn’t been much. We weren’t even fighting about it anymore.

But I still wished I’d gone to the meeting with her.

OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, as we settled in, found places to put everything in the new house, found a doctor for Sara, and found our way around town, we came to know our neighbors in Sycamore Court.

Pete and Melody Seward had celebrated their eighth wedding anniversary that June. Like us, they’d both been through divorces. Once upon a time, Pete had played football for Iowa State. Now he was a marketing VP for the local cable company. Though we insisted that we didn’t watch much television, he set us up with the premium channel package as a housewarming gift. Melody worked in the human resources department at the First State Bank of Clark Falls. She introduced Sara to her yoga instructor.

Trish and Barry Firth both worked for her father’s business,
a commercial glass distributor, Trish in the employment office, Barry in sales. They had twin toddlers: a girl named Jordan and a boy named Jacob. Upon discovering that we were expecting— a fact Trish somehow intuited long before we’d chosen to mention it to anyone—Barry delivered to our house, under cover of night, four unmarked plastic storage tubs packed full of gender-neutral infant wear. He winked at Sara, chucked me on the shoulder, and said, “Congratulations, you guys. Mum’s the word.”

Michael Sprague lived in the rambling Craftsman between the Firths and Roger Mallory. He’d spent some time in our neck of the woods, having studied at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, New York. He’d returned to Clark Falls five years ago to take care of his ailing mother, stayed after meeting his partner, Ben, and now ran the kitchen at The Flatiron, an upscale restaurant on the riverfront.

We learned that Ben worked as a corporate trainer, and that he’d recently taken some kind of temporary contract job in Seattle. That was all we knew about that.

Michael had converted their backyard into a roaring vegetable garden; he kept the whole circle in fresh produce through the summer, plus a dozen different colors of squash in the fall. Visiting one night, he hugged each of us and thanked us for moving in.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Everybody’s terrific. You’ll like it here. I’m just saying that if we’d tilted any farther to the right my house might have fallen over.”

Sara invited Roger Mallory over for dinner to thank him for our new alarm system, brought to us courtesy of Sentinel One Incorporated, a local home security company. One call from Roger, and a crew showed up with spools of cable and power drills. They left us fortified with enough special wiring to lock down a minor military position, installing the whole works free of charge.

“Stop thanking me,” he told us, polishing off the last of the kebabs. “The owner and I were on the force together. I send
him plenty of business. Besides, I got him free ad space in the Chamber of Commerce brochure. He owes me one.”

On a given night, you could leave our front door and find somebody out visiting with somebody else. You could watch the Firth twins playing in the common with little Sofia, Pete and Melody’s four- year- old. You could always have a chat with Roger, who seemed to preside over the goings- on in Sycamore Court like everybody’s favorite uncle.

We found ourselves doing all of these things, and it didn’t take long before we felt at home.

Nobody is going to care about Michael Sprague’s vegetable garden. Nobody will care what our neighbors do for a living, or how many channels we get on our television. Nobody will care that Sara and I lost a baby in August.

From here on, the only thing anybody will care about is me and Brit Seward.

“Are all these boxes full of books?”

That was the very first question she asked me, the Monday morning after the emergency meeting of the Ponca Heights Neighborhood Association. Melody, who didn’t work Mondays, had sent Brit over to deliver a hand- labeled DVD containing our news broadcast, which Pete had somehow procured through the cable company. Sara had gone to campus to meet with the dean; I was at home, still unpacking. I’d only asked Brittany inside because the guys from Sentinel One were busy working on the front door.

“All books,” I said.

“
All
of them?”

“That’s exactly what the movers said.”

She put her hands on her hips and scanned the rampart of boxes stacked four high along the length of one dining room wall. “OMG.”

Oh my God.
The teenagers in Iowa spoke the same language as the ones in Boston. “LOL,” I said.

She laughed out loud. “Cool.”

“That’s not what the movers said.”

“I
love
to read. What’s your favorite book?”

“You mean out of all of them?”

“I used to be into Harry Potter when I was a kid. Now I’m kind of all over the place.”

“Oh yeah? What’s the last book you read?”

She thought about it. “I just read
Bridge to Terabithia.
That was pretty good. Except I already saw the movie two years ago, so I knew the end. The book was better. Did you read
Da Vinci Code?”

I couldn’t say that I had.

“Me either. I’m reading this book now, I checked it out from the library. The title made me think of Ponca Heights.”

“Wuthering Heights?”

“That’s it! Have you ever read that one?”

“Once or twice.”

“It’s sort of hard.”

“And a little depressing,” I said. “But stick with it. It’s pretty good.”

“Talk about depressing, I’m grounded all week. That’s depressing.”

I was happy to talk books, but I didn’t know what to say to that. Thankfully, the foreman of the Sentinel One crew stepped into the house and waved me over. I excused myself and went to answer his question, which involved the placement of the “master console” in the entryway. I told him that he was the expert. He agreed.

When I returned to the dining room, I found Brittany Seward peering into an open box, head tilted, scanning book spines.

“Well,” I said. “It was nice talking to you, Brittany. Let me know when you finish with Heathcliff and Catherine.”

If she heard me, she made no indication.

“Tell your mom we said thanks for the DVD, okay?”

Still nothing. She appeared to be lost. I liked her already. But what was I supposed to do with her?

Looking again at the daunting stack of boxes along the wall, thinking for maybe the hundredth time about how little I relished the thought of dragging all of them upstairs, unpacking them, realphabetizing everything I’d packed out of order in the first place, I had a flash of inspiration.

Roger Mallory had stopped by first thing that morning to check on the workers from Sentinel One. He’d brought with him a copy of the Ponca Heights Neighborhood Directory, which consisted of a few photocopied pages of telephone numbers stapled together in a booklet. It had local fire, police, and emergency contact information organized up front, a Safer Places logo printed on the back cover. “We’ll get these updated if you and Sara want to list your number,” he’d said.